Why the ’system’ won’t change quickly — by Tony Bates and Trent Batson
Batson, T. (2010) Let faculty off the hook Campus Technology, March 17
“I liked this article very much. Trent Batson lays out a whole host of compelling reasons why it is so difficult to get faculty to change and use technology more and better. His main argument is that the whole ecology of higher educational institutions reinforces the status quo.”
From DSC:
Most institutions won’t change…not until the writing is on the wall. As a related example, Blockbuster now gets it and has been scrambling to make the necessary changes to stay in the game — they now offer movies-on-demand and will deliver movies directly to you. However, they were very late to the game and nearly lost their shirt because of it (they still might). They didn’t change until Apple and Netflix came along with some seriously-attractive alternatives to the “traditional way” of renting movies — and were either forced to change or to file for bankruptcy.
When someone gets it right within higher education (see below), such an organization will be copied over and over again (witness what happens every time to Apple and their innovations). Such a trend will issue in a new system that will leave the traditional institutions scrambling to catch up. The faculty members alone won’t be able to make the changes.
To me “getting it right” means:
- We need TEAMS of specialists to create and deliver multimedia-based, rich, interactive content (much like those in healthcare-related fields did long ago — they specialized. The for-profit organizations out there already are doing this and are enjoying very healthy growth rates.)
- Such content will be offered in 2-5 different ways (audio only, audio/video, simulations, games, text/graphics)
- We need administrations that are visionary in their approaches and will get the faculty members and the rest of the specialists the support and resources that they need to make the necessary transitions
- We need to turn the control over to students to pursue their passions
- We need to let students’ passions drive their learning
- We need to guide the students, while letting them create more of the content themselves — i.e. allowing for more active, participatory types of learning
- Such offerings will be extremely affordable — due to the volume of learning that occurs and/or due to developing stronger consortiums and repositories of content (which spread out the costs)
- We need CULTURES that are OPEN/WILLING to make changes.
That’s my 2 cents here.
